Prof. Venugopal Veeravalli is currently the Henry Magnuski Professor in the ECE Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

After getting a Silver Medal Honours B.Tech. degree in 1985 from IIT Bombay, he went on to receive his MS in 1987 from Carnegie-Mellon University, and his PhD in 1992 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – all in Electrical Engineering.

Prof. Veeravalli joined the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2000 and also holds appointments in the Department of Statistics, the Coordinated Science
Laboratory, and the Discovery Partners Institute. He served as Director of the Illinois Centre for Wireless Systems (ICWS) from 2007-2015. He served as a program director for communications research at the U.S. National Science Foundation in Arlington, VA during 2003-2005. Before joining the University of Illinois, he was an assistant professor in the ECE department at Cornell University from 1996 to 2000. His research interests span the theoretical areas of statistical inference, machine learning, and information theory, with applications to data science, wireless communications, sensor networks, and cyberphysical systems. He has made impactful contributions in the following areas:

–  Wireless communication networks, specifically efficient power control and handoff algorithms, interference management, and coordinated multipoint transmission.
–  Distributed inference in sensor networks, with applications to the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT).
–  Sequential change detection in stochastic time series and its applications in pandemic monitoring, fault detection in power systems, and learning in nonstationary environments.
–  Robust machine learning, particularly out-of-distribution detection and hallucination detection in large-language models.

As for initiatives, he has been on the editorial boards of major journals in his field and on organizational committees of major conferences and workshops. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He served as General Chair in 2014 and Technical Program Chair in 2019 for the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, the premier conference in his field. He served as Program Director for communications research at the US National Science Foundation from 2003 to 2005, where he played an important role in safeguarding and expanding support for the Communications and Information Foundations area.

Prof. Veeravalli has graduated nearly 30 PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, who are now at top positions in industry, academia, and US national labs.

He has won several awards and accolades over the years. These include:

–  Institute Silver Medal, IIT Bombay, 1985.
–  IEEE Browder J. Thompson Prize Award, 1996, an award given to an outstanding paper by authors under the age of 30 selected from all the publications of the IEEE.
–  PECASE (Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers), 1999, to recognize outstanding research in wireless communications and for innovations in teaching. This is “the highest honour bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding new scientists and engineers who are in the early stages of establishing their
independent research careers.”
–  Fellow of the IEEE, 2006, “for contributions to wireless communications and sensor networks.”
–  Distinguished Lecturer, IEEE Signal Processing Society, 2010 2011.
–  Abraham Wald Prize in Sequential Analysis, 2015 and 2019. This is the highest honour bestowed by the statistical sequential analysis community.
–  Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair in Information and Communications Technologies, 2023.
–  Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), 2024.
–  Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), 2024, “for outstanding contributions to sequential hypothesis testing and quickest change detection.”
–  Distinguished Lecturer, IEEE Information Theory Society, 2025-2026.

Hobbies::
I enjoy playing tennis whenever I can, both singles and doubles; playing bridge and board games with friends; watching plays, especially ones in smaller theatres in Chicago; and watching cricket, especially IPL.”